Israel - Hamas War IX

[mormont]

On the other hand, Israeli numbers that do claim to distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters surely have to be treated with a very high degree of scepticism? I can’t imagine how Israel can reliably put a verifiable figure on identifiable Hamas fighters in the circumstances, unless they simply assume that anyone they targeted as a Hamas fighter was indeed a Hamas fighter. 

The number I saw the IDF claiming was 4,000 Hamas fighters killed, which is an astonishingly high proportion of the total number of deaths Israel says there has been. 

[Conflicting Thought]

2 hours ago, LynnS said:

I never imagined that I would witness something so monstrous in my lifetime and I thought 9/11 was horrific.  The crimes committed by Hamas go well beyond that by any standard of morality.

yes the crimes of hamas are fucking horrible, you could say the same of israel, i think, the crimes commited by them (settlers, idf) are plenty and fucking horrible to, there is no shortage of stories by palestinian survivors of israeli opression in gaza and in the west bank, rapes, torture, murder, but somehow those crimes dont generate the same fervour to stop them(even though they are being perpetrated sistematically, for a long long time), those crimes dont requiere that we stop them by "any means necessary",why is that? so much sorrow and tears but somehow the suffering of palestinain people dont deserve the same level of empathy granted to israelis. palestianian people are humans to you know, they deserve better.

i think also that "by any means necessary" is a very problematic thing to say and belive, isnt that what "terrorist" say?

edited to say that the thinking "by any means..." is a complex one, because for example i do belive that in fighting opression, and im thinking in a specic example, that of the fight against the dictatorship in chile. in guerrila warfeare you sometimes have to use tactics that are considered to be "terroristic" and i think that some times those are justyfied in the fight against opression so i dont know, its a  nuanced problem i think

 

Edited November 11, 2023 by Conflicting Thought

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

We should have worried about how many more Nazis were created for every Nazi killed.

We, uh, did. Quite a bit. Postwar planning in earnest started in 1943. The allies spent a massive amount of capital and soldiers to ensure Germany didn't regress, we looked for locals to trust and take over, and it took multiple years.

The argument has never been that this bombing will create hamas 2.0. It is that the bombing combined with a weak plan for afterwards will do so. I get you're being glib here but I don't think that concern is unwarranted. And every civilian killed makes it harder to get to that point.

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, mormont said:

The number I saw the IDF claiming was 4,000 Hamas fighters killed, which is an astonishingly high proportion of the total number of deaths Israel says there has been. 

Looked up the source and without more information of that assessment, it reminds me of US assessments of how much they had degraded the Taliban or Al-Qaeda -- there were pretty wide error bars.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

We, uh, did. Quite a bit. Postwar planning in earnest started in 1943. The allies spent a massive amount of capital and soldiers to ensure Germany didn't regress, we looked for locals to trust and take over, and it took multiple years.

The argument has never been that this bombing will create hamas 2.0. It is that the bombing combined with a weak plan for afterwards will do so. I get you're being glib here but I don't think that concern is unwarranted. And every civilian killed makes it harder to get to that point.

That involved a total military defeat followed by an occupation. All major allies either switched sides or were defeated too(including the only two uses of nuclear weapons in war). Also all of the leaders either died or were arrested.  That would require a massive escalation and expanding the war to most of the middle east.

[Ran]

I agree with all that, actually. I was being rather glib, it's true, but it's just pointing out that in fact you can go to war with the idea of serious permanent change to the governance and even culture of a country. Ditto Japan.

One can only hope that solid plans work out. It's everyone's interest in the region for the post-Hamas future to be better for Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Well, maybe not Iran's or Lebanon's, but fuck them.

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

That involved a total military defeat followed by an occupation. All major allies either switched sides or were defeated too(including the only two uses of nuclear weapons in war). Also all of the leaders either died or were arrested.  That would require a massive escalation and expanding the war to most of the middle east.

I don't think that's true. It does require giving Palestinians a reason or several reasons to not go with Iran but it doesn't require Iran to be destroyed. It does require actually trying to cultivate relations with Palestinians, something that Israel has been unwilling to do for the last 15 years. 

Because, again, we see what happens if you don't. If you just kill a bunch of rebels and terrorists along with a lot of civilians and give them nothing, they will do this or worse with the next generation. We see this with Beirut and Lebanon, we see this with isis, we even saw this with hamas. A purely military solution only works if you are going to kill everyone. 

[Werthead]

41 minutes ago, Ran said:

I agree with all that, actually. I was being rather glib, it's true, but it's just pointing out that in fact you can go to war with the idea of serious permanent change to the governance and even culture of a country. Ditto Japan.

Yup, and the US and European leaders discussed in 1989/90 if it was possible to do the same for Russia (effectively rebuilding it with western institutions). Some Russians were even amenable to the idea (Putin even floated it in the late 1990s, wanting Russia to be the next Germany or Japan, although he did talk a lot of shit back then). However, because Russia had not been defeated in detail in a major war, it was decided not to force that issue as it might make the Russians feel humiliated and embolden them to future instability and regression. So that worked out.

[TrueMetis]

9 hours ago, Relic said:

I would start with not shooting shields, and work from there. If you kill civilians, and then continue to kill civilians, guess what? You're the bad guy too. Israel has crossed a line here, and even its allies are starting to realize it. 

Crossed that line a long time ago, indeed I'm trying to think of a crime Hamas has committed that Israel hasn't, mass deliberate killing of civilians? Yep, even if you handwave the current bombing as "acceptable causalities from acceptable targets" we have IDF snipers bragging about killing civilians. Hostage taking? Thousands of Palestianans are being held by Israel on no charge, including children. Sexual violence? Again, yep. IDF soldiers have raped women and sexual violence is commonplace in the prison those hostages are kept. This isn't bad guy vs good guy, it's bad guy vs bad guy with a whole lot of innocent civilians caught in between with some people only caring about one group of civilians.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/gaza-s-walking-wounded-israeli-snipers-have-shot-6-392-protesters-in-lower-limbs-this-year-1.800691

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/03/i-remember-the-knee-in-the-crosshairs-bursting-open-israeli-snipers-boast-of-shooting-ducks-in-gaza/

Anyway back to the hospital, it should be noted that Hamas rejects the claim the hospital is being used for military purposes, and you might say Hamas is untrustworthy and you're right, but they're not any less untrustworthy than the IDF. If only there was a organization that was tasked with looking into these kind of things, except there is, this is exactly the type of thing the UN is for. To bad the IDF keeps killing their workers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/hamas-rejects-israeli-claim-over-installations-under-al-shifa-hospital

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-12/israel-gaza-war-latest-updates-al-shifa-hospital-video/103094596

Directors of the hospital reject the claims to, but again could be lies.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-forces-approach-key-gaza-hospital-what-will-they-do-2023-11-09/

[Zorral]

Quote

 

'We walked into a wasteland' - BBC's Jeremy Bowen in Gaza with Israeli forces

The BBC's international editor Jeremy Bowen has travelled with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into Gaza.

While the BBC had editorial control of the report, the section with the IDF has been viewed by them.

The IDF showed the BBC what they said was a Hamas weapons factory, below a home in which children lived.

 

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67362960

This was posted 2 days ago, btw, so where comes the declaration there are no BBC people in Gaza I don't know.

Listening to BBC's World News report on the hospital situation right now.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

Our Israeli friend has just posted on FB all the horrors to which her Palestinian friends are being subjected, in Israel, by Israelis, and to which her Israeli friends who object to these behaviors are being subjected to by Israelis, including violence and losing their jobs

 

[Mudguard]

4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I didn’t see the videos myself, but a friend who has been following the war very closely said there are videos on the internet released by the IDF showing rocket launch sites, as they have pushed  into Gaza, one at a what he thought was like a Boy Scout camp, rocket launchers behind a wall and on the other side the wall is painted with what he called scenes appealing to kids, and another at a mosque, where the rocket launcher/s were built into the foundation of the mosque.

I have seen detailed maps of tunnels, released by the IDF and which CNN was showing before the IDF’s entry into Gaza. 186 miles of tunnels. My friend is a civil engineer and explained to me that of course, with the tunnels being underground, there are air shafts bringing fresh air down into the tunnels. They’re easy to find because at night in the desert the temperature drops and the air coming up is warm, and can be easily found by infra red cameras. I have heard reports on CNN from the IDF reporting how many air shafts they’ve blown up. Apparently this is the same technique being used by the Ukrainians to find buried bombs, because the bombs are warmer than the ground. It’s quite easy to see nexus points on the tunnel map.

There are also spy satellites,, and apparently there are detailed images of the infrastructure built under the Indonesian Hospital, which Hamas built, where the support structure for the tunnels under the hospital can easily be seen. 

There’s an HBO documentary about small towns in the USA, and one town they covered was Sioux Falls. There’s a smalller town a few miles away where Telesat has their data storage centre, the single largest data storage centre of earth images in the US. They showed how their satellites circle the earth every 48 minutes, taking pictures, iirc, in overlapping bands 18 Km wide as they go around the planet. There are lots of other satellites taking images and I’m sure Israeli intelligence has a damn good idea where all the tunnels are.

I don’t think moving a tunnel hq is all that easy, they would have a great deal of infrastructure built into whatever the building above the nexus point is. Communication systems, for example. That’s stuff that’s expensive to build and difficult to move, and although Hamas is well funded I hardly think they have money to create complex hqs in dozens of locations.

I completely believe the reporting about the extensive tunnel system.  There's tons of evidence out there.  The HQ though, is different, where not one picture or video exists, even though it's location supposedly isn't a secret anyway.

From what I understand, the HQ is located in the basement structure that was completed in the 1980's.  This basement structure was intended as an expansion of the medical facilities, but is now alleged to have been taken over by Hamas leadership and made into their HQ.  If the HQ was actually there at one time, it would certainly be possible to move it over 15 years.  The cost and labor to build hundreds of miles of tunnel is very high, and they had the money for that, along with the money to build tens of thousands of rockets.  Maybe hundreds of thousands of rockets over the past 15 years.  Given that, I don't think moving the equipment would be insurmountable if they wanted to do it.  And having the location of your secret HQ being blown seems to me to be a very good reason to relocate.

I watched the preview of the 2006 or 2007 PBS documentary on Al Shifa (couldn't find the whole episode online), and it was interesting.  There's a confrontation between one of the doctors and presumably a Hamas soldier.  Other reporting in the next several years claimed that Hamas soldiers and leadership would freely walk through the halls.  But I cannot find any similar type evidence of a Hamas presence in the hospital in recent times. 

As far as I can tell, they aren't walking the halls now, and they don't appear to have been shooting from the hospital.  If they are really there, why are they just sitting there and doing nothing while other forces are actively engaged with the IDF just outside the hospital?  It's just really strange. Are they only going to defend the HQ if Israel sends troops into the hospital?  

It seems that the IDF and director of Al Shifa are in contact with each other.  I wish that both parties could agree to an inspection of the basement.  If the doctors were telling the truth that Hamas isn't there, there really shouldn't be a strong objection to an inspection, perhaps you allow the inspection in exchange for supplies.  If the IDF asked to do an inspection in exchange for supplies and were refused, I would then be extremely suspicious that the doctors have been lying and would lean to the existence of the HQ.  But as far as I'm aware, neither party has mentioned offering or refusing any sort of inspection.

I'm hoping this catastrophe at the hospital resolves itself soon.

[Ran]

19 minutes ago, Zorral said:

This was posted 2 days ago, btw, so where comes the declaration there are no BBC people in Gaza I don't know.

I suppose I should have specified "Hamas-held parts of Gaza", i.e. the hospitals. But fair enough, now that troops have started to secure ground, reporters are being embedded. There was an Israeli reporter who stumbled across a young soldier sitting in a building studying linear algebra for when he could get back to his university studies.

I think that that suggestion, @Mudguard, would be great if it could be done. It'd be a simple solution.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Ran

[Craving Peaches]

Quote

“Don’t make the mistake of going to war. That would be the mistake of your life… Your entry into the war will seal the fate of Lebanon,” Benjamin Netanyahu said [regarding Hezbollah].

Another thinly veiled threat?

[kissdbyfire]

11 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

Another thinly veiled threat?

No, not veiled at all.

[TrueMetis]

Interview with one of the settler leaders in the West Bank, these people are fucking nuts just in case you aren't aware.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers

Edited November 11, 2023 by TrueMetis

[Ran]

From Rear Admiral Hagari:

So, good news if they can get the infants out safely.

[Zorral]

Maybe with IDF protection ... but these escape routes routinely are subject to bombing, as I've been hearing all day.  The roadsides are lined with bodies and wreckage.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Watched CNN coverage of the London protest march -- 300,000! -- the destination the US Embassy. Many UK Jewish participants.  World opinion, Israel, world opinion is not supporting your objectives.  So many say, "Despite the horror of the October 7th atrocities, Israel has crossed the line."

Edited November 11, 2023 by Zorral

[kissdbyfire]

26 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Interview with one of the settler leaders in the West Bank, these people are fucking nuts just in case you aren't aware.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers

And thousands upon thousands just like her. JFC.

[Craving Peaches]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

From Rear Admiral Hagari:

So, good news if they can get the infants out safely.

So there's no siege because they say there's no siege? Even though many in the hospital says there is? I don't see how the infants can get out safely with no electricity. Where would they go then? To the south of Gaza? It's not really safe there either...

Edited November 11, 2023 by Craving Peaches